Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday July 29, 2012 @11:20AM
from the next-step dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Project Glass made a big splash not too long ago at Google's annual developer conference when they showed several users falling on to the Moscone West in San Francisco. Google's pretty bent on showing us the sharing possibilities with Project Glass, but it feels like in time that technology could become a ubiquitous part of our lives. Fortunately for those of us who lack a hyperactive imagination, a short film popped up recently that can help fill in the blanks. The world created in the film was made possible by wearable tech. Games, cooking challenges, information in real-time about the person you are talking to, all made possible by the contact lenses being worn. And of course there's a darkside to the equation, the potential to hack and therefore influence the actions of others. Ultimately, it's a realistic idea of the future we all face."

Here [valvesoftware.com] is an excellent blog post by a Valve Software employee about the potential of augmented reality. Basically, the real thing like what you see in the video above while the guy is cutting the cucumber is very hard. Things like perfect motion tracking, contextual awareness, seamless overlays are science fiction at this point. But this is a very compelling scenario and very smart people are working on it so sooner or later it's happening. Hopefully Google Glass will get us one step closer. Ironically, one of the best uses for it is real life ad block. Imagine riding down the freeway and every billboard is replaced by a giant sequoia. Or a mushroom Smurf house.

The Internet is a funny place. About half the comments on any blog post about Glass are comments mocking it. Yet in the next breath, the same commented will decry "lack of innovation" in the tech industry. Personally I don't need yet another way to edit my spreadsheets or unlock my phone. I'm ready for something new and consumer palatable augmented reality is it. Google might still get it wrong but I'm with them all the way for trying.

Polished piece of work... must have been quite a bit of work, but there is a major inconsistency:

For the major part of the film and during most of the interaction with the girl he is dating, the info he gathers on her is a distraction and makes him look like a dork.

Indeed, this is all information (her Facebook profile) he could have read beforehand, which is already possible and happening in the real world. As his prior gathering of info would have been rather uninteresting in the story (although it would surely have been more efficient for him achieving his goal), here it is shown happening in real time. It can only be a distraction, especially in a live conversation, and the film carries this quite well. The guy looks like an idiot.

Then, at the very end, what has been portrayed as a debilitating distraction suddenly turns into an absolute power of manipulation, out of all conventions built during the preceding scenes, and without letting the viewer know what would be the source of that power. He stops her going out of his apartment by a simple voice command, and presumably rewinds her memory to prior her discovery of damning information on him. All of this happens in the very last seconds of the film, where we are suddenly thrown in deep sci-fi territory, in a completely inconsistent way. The film concludes on that little surprise, and it is obvious that it could not have carried on after such a stunt.

So, I see this as a slick flick without much depth, attempting to piggyback on the publicity surrounding Google Glass. Clever.